


we could see the kilos and the keys

by kalks



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Gen, machiavellian antics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2019-11-04
Packaged: 2021-01-23 01:24:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21311863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalks/pseuds/kalks
Summary: You’ve seen all the old stills in the family photo album, but they’re too formal and solemn to match up with the stories he’s told you.
Relationships: Greg Hirsch & Kendall Roy
Comments: 6
Kudos: 51





	we could see the kilos and the keys

You’re rambling. You know it because you can feel your voice vibrating and rumbling through the cavern of your throat, unravelling in one long, slow, slurred spool of speech. You can feel the shag carpet soft and snug at the nape of your neck, and you’re convinced you can feel it at your heels too, through your socks. He presses his palm to the sole of your left foot like it’s another hand, and the touch tickles just slightly. He lets out a warbly, warm little laugh, tumbling out of him like he’s surprised by it. _ Palm to palm is—what’s that fuckin’ Shakespeare line? Palm to palm.. holy.. something holy. _ He laughs again, and you lean your head to the side to look at him, knocking softly against his own socked foot. Images run through your head of twins in big, dark, warm chambers, hands holding feet and palms pressing firm between the shoulder blades during hugs. You wonder if this is what having a brother is like. Your mind flicks through its little Rolodex, settles on a an overheard conversation, a jumble of text on the screen of a laptop. _ Palm to palm is holy palmers kiss, dude? _His eyes blink open, bloodshot and heavy-lidded, and his face stretches into a slow, delighted smile, eyebrows up. 

You’re looking at him down your nose, straining your neck a little because of the awkward angle, feeling it sing a little song of pain that zips down your spine. His freckles look darker in the dim lighting of the penthouse, just one of those big canvas floor lamps on that look like cocoons. You can’t see it now, but you know there’s a little fissure between his front teeth, the first gasp of a gap that never fully settled. You know it’s because he didn’t wear his retainer when he got his braces off as a kid, because he told you that. He knows about the birthmark on the side of your hip bone, the way it looks like a topographic map of Lake Winnipeg. He knows about the girl with the blonde curls and the goofy reindeer antler headband who’d told you that during your last Christmas in Canada, your back against the wall of a bathroom stall in some dingy hick bar lit by strings of tiny red and green bulbs. He knows the way she’d pulled off and wouldn’t do anything else until she’d tilted the fluorescent rectangle of her cracked phone screen up and showed you the grainy, pixelated image on Google. How she’d huffed out a hoarse little laugh while tracing the tip of her finger across the mottled mark on your skin, how you’d been too embarrassed to call her back when you’d made it home. You think these are the kind of things that brothers share. 

_ Look at you, man, _ he says. _ Greg the Egg, all cultured and shit. _

You vaguely hear yourself talking about a culture piece you read in the New York Times, the relevance of dramatic works from the Early Modern period in today’s current socio-political climate, all the big weighty words you’ve heard from talking workshops about renewal, a vague sense memory of expensive craft beer dancing on your tongue. He’s laughing again, snaking his palm across your foot and wheezing in response when you feel an electric tinge dance up your calf and you kick out on reflex. Your baby toe catches him softly on the ear, and he grips your ankle and shakes it out in slow motion. _ Sto-op, man! Stop, I feel like I’m back in college _ , he says between great big huffs of laughter, _ this is boy’s night, man. It’s Machiavellian fucks night. _ He props himself up on his elbows and you mimic the movement and then you’re both moving as one, feeling a cottony soft blanket of warmth settle around your shoulders and back. _ D’you feel like you’re in bed right now? _he says, leaning in close and whispering like it’s a secret between just the two of you. 

* * *

Then you’re bundled up on opposite ends of the big luxe leather sofa that’s shaped like a capital ‘L’, you on the long side because you need the room to stretch out and him on the short side because he likes to curl in on himself like a cat. He’s hunched over the coffee table messing around on his laptop, scrolling through songs on Spotify all that have weird, sad names. You’re trying to wind a soft knitted blanket around your neck, watching him frown down at the screen with a strip of sour rainbow belt candy hanging out of the side of his mouth. He finally finds what he’s looking for and a woman’s voice cascades through the penthouse speakers, a syrupy sweet siren call boosted by a winding, slow guitar and echoes of bouncy drum beats. It sounds like something vintage, tripping through its melody with slow, self-assured, Old Hollywood grace. You ask if this is a classic, if it’s _ like, some Woodstock shit _ . He laughs long and low, rainbow candy bouncing between his fingers and scattering glittery crystals of sugar across his knees as his shoulders shake up, up, up, and down, down, down. He tells you the artist, tells you that _ this came out like, five years ago, dude. But yeah, it’s a classic. _ And you smile broadly at him and tap the fleshy pad of your finger to the side of your nose, feel the touch echo and ripple across your skin. _ Sure, okay. Make fun of me because I don’t know your sad girl sugar daddy shit. _You don’t even know what you’re saying, but it folds his face up into a big grin again, so it’s alright. You fluff up the blanket at your shoulders and begin the long lean forward to reach the coffee table. 

Big swirls of colour bloom across the glass of your bong, and sometimes in the right light, when the lighter is sparking up and flickering around near the bowl piece, the colours collide and swim together. There’s a fading scrawl of black Sharpie across the percolator, ‘_ Randy’s shit dnt touch’ _ in wonky, crabbed little capital letters. He asked you about it one of the first times you stayed the night to smoke. You’d told him about dropping out of the community college back in Minnesota, the way you’d been feeling shitty and small while packing everything into cardboard boxes that all looked the same, just deciding on a whim to shove your roommate’s bong in on top of all your stupid hoodies and tape the box up before you could think it through. He’d told you about cheap packs of double-A batteries and plastic bottles of vape liquid and back then you’d been too polite and awkward to tell him that it wasn’t the same thing. But now, sometimes he pounces on you and pokes at your ribs and threatens to _ tell Randy you’re touching all his shit! _ and you laugh and slap his hands away, mumbling stupid retorts about _ sending an e-mail to Karolina about mountains of candy and more vape juice than any one human can vaporise! _

Initially during these nights together he’d been quiet, near-catatonic on the couch with an Xbox controller in his hands listening to you tell stories and stumble through lame jokes, kicking out occasionally at your leg with one socked foot while he was mowing down hoards of pixelated zombies in a souped-up video game truck and wanted you to comment on it. At some point after the park coke disaster and before he’d handed you the keys to a shiny empty apartment with lots of headroom, he’d started leaving the controller by the wayside and flipping the TV off. You remember one time when the evening had slipped into night without either of you noticing or getting up to turn a light on, the open floor plan of the penthouse standing dark and solemn around you. He’d smiled at you from his corner of the couch, gleaming and catlike, and then you were both in the kitchen, doing what he called _some_ _Bear Grylls type nature channel shit_. Taking turns crouching over the faucet, softly backlit by the glowing New York skyline and the soundtrack of humming traffic washed out by a stream of cold, filtered water. He’d straightened up and passed the back of his hand over his mouth in one quick, sharp movement. Then he'd suddenly said _let’s make this boy’s night. _And it had taken you by surprise and you’d snorted water out of your nose, hands scrabbling at cool marble to find purchase, doubled over wheezing with shocked gargles of laughter. And he’d peered up at you with a funny look in his eye, mouth pulling up into the start of a smile. _Come on, dude, don’t die on me after I just made this a thing. _

Eventually he starts telling you stories of his own, mostly about his adolescence, about the rest of your second cousins that still intimidate you a little. He tells you about the Greenwich Golden Triangle house, sprawling hallways and huge dining rooms, playing chase across checkered tiles and games of hide and seek between the topiary. Dopey grin on his face while cracking jokes about Roman’s funny pageboy haircut back when he was scrawny and freckly and too-pale, even shorter than he is now. He tells you about cigarettes behind the stables, about secret congregations in the Roy family maze during summer break. He tells you about how they’d had _ all that Catholic boarding school bullshit _ bred into them, the way they’d held midnight mass clothed in togas made of bed sheets, sharing swigs from a stolen bottle of Château Margaux. The way their lips and teeth were always stained slightly crimson by the time the sun crept up and drenched them in golden light, the way they’d stumbled back to separate beds with grass stained feet and muddy elbows.

He tells you about Rome with his pouty mouth and a ring of leaves at the crown of his head, _ kind of like a faggy little emperor _ , the way he’d hurl insults around punctuated by lackadaisical, limp twists of his wrist. Shiv with her soot-rimmed eyes and her blunt amber bob, pulling up expensive linen to show one freckled ankle and the tiny, intricate lines of a swirly tattoo she’d let one of her artsy summertime flings stick and poke for her. You’ve seen all the old stills in the family photo album, but they’re too formal and solemn to match up with the stories he’s told you. You try to animate him in your mind as a sixteen year old with his sullen eyes and the hair he’d let grow long, tumbling over his forehead in surprisingly springy curls, you imagine him telling everyone to _ fuck off _in an awkwardly pitchy voice, long before it had settled into the flat baritone you know now. 

Tonight though, he settles the bong gently on a bed of pristine copies of National Geographic and leans back into the nest of blankets he’s created for himself, tucking his chin in and leaning his head across your outstretched calves. He asks you if you’d ever want to be CEO someday, and you think you’ve misheard him for a second. _ What about you? Big chair in the top floor Waystar. Live like a prince. _ Your thoughts stutter and stop, chase themselves around in circles. You want to say _ no, fuck no. _ You want to say _ I’m not part of this, I’m not tangled up in all your weird, fucked-up paternal issues. _ But you suppose that you are, now. You feel the way wealth has crept under your skin, the way it echoes the hot, insistent itch of sand mite bites at your throat. You remember the way it felt to say _ I made copies _, and the righteous buzz of that knowledge in your head and the power you’d held in shaking hands. So you swallow everything down and lay a belt of rainbow candy across your tongue to taste tangy sugar sparkle and fizz like fireworks. You laugh, trying to hold all your spit in your mouth and failing a little. You ask him why he’s even asking. He shrugs, and you feel the crush of his ear through the blanket as his head rolls across your calf. 

_ What if we tear it all down? _ He says, and your thoughts collapse and crumble into static. _ You like documents, right? _

_ Yeah, _ you say, _ yeah, I like documents _ . Your tongue trips through the word again, stretching it out like _ do-o-ocuments. _ He laughs and curls in a little more, hunching his back against a clump of velvet throw cushions, looking so comfortable that his body language is practically purring. He says, _ I bet you could find some documents for me _ . You say, _ I don’t know if I should be betting with an addict _ , because you’re at that stage now, where you can bully him back a little _ . _ He laughs and you feel the blustery heat of it through all the blankets. He says, _ yeah man, _ _ whatever _ , slower this time. He says _ hold on to that integrity, _and you get the sense that he's only half-joking.

There’s a lull in the conversation where it’s just siren-song music in your ears and warmth all around and you feel yourself almost drifting into sleep. _ I mean it though, _ he says, and his voice is so low and mumbly that he’s definitely almost asleep too, and everything is tipping slowly into darkness. He says, _ I think we could do it. I think I know a way. _

You nod and you nod again, and you know in the back of your mind that you’ll both remember this conversation in the morning, and you feel somehow that it’s some sort of slurred contract between the two of you, bound together with a bong and a bundle of blankets.

**Author's Note:**

> lana del rey is kendall's top-streamed artist on spotify. and yes, she’s above beastie boys and lcd soundsystem.


End file.
